This argument on the contextual nature of identities must be maintained without restriction. Claude Lefort, for example, has shown how a category like 'worker' does not designate a suprahistorical essence, since its condition of existence is the separation of the direct producer from the community and the land, and this required the genesis of capitalism.
Sayfa 24 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
What we find, then, is not an interaction or determination between fully constituted areas of the social, but a field of relational semi-identities in which ʻpolitical', 'economic' and ‘ideological' elements will enter into unstable relations of imbrication without ever managing to constitute themselves as separate objects.
Sayfa 24 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
While the first — objectivist - kind of questioning of the social looks for essential characters behind historical specificity, the second moves in the opposite direction; weakening the boundary of essence through the radical contextualization of any object.
Sayfa 22 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
If the constitutive nature of antagonism is taken for granted, the mode of questioning of the social is completely modified, since contingency radically penetrates the very identity of the social agents. The two antagonistic forces are not the expression of a deeper objective movement that would include both of them; and the course of history cannot be explained in terms of the essential 'objectivity of either. The latter is always an objectivity threatened by a constitutive outside. But as we know, this implies that the conditions of existence of any objectivity that might exist must be sought at the level of a factual history. Moreover, as this objectivity has a merely relational identity with its conditions of existence, it means that the 'essential identity' of the entity in question will always be transgressed and redefined.
Sayfa 22 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
Link between the blocking and simultancous affirmation of an identiey is what we call 'contingency', which introduces an element of radical undecidability into the structure of objectivity.
Sayfa 21 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
In our case, there is a more subtle dialectic between necessity and contingency: as identity depends entirely on conditions of existence which are contingent, its relatonship with them is absolutely necessary. What we find, then, is a relationship of complete imbrication between both: essence is nothing outside its accidents. But this means - and this is the second consequence -that the antagonizing force fulfils two crucial and contradictory roles at the same time. On the one hand, it 'blocks' the full constitution of the identity to which it is opposed and thus shows its contingency. But on the other hand, given that this latter identity, like all identities, is merely relational and would therefore not be what it outside the relationship with the force antagonizing it, the latter is also part of the conditions of existence of that identity.
Sayfa 21 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
Contingency does not therefore mean a set of merely external and aleatory relations between identities, but the impossibility of fixing with any precision -that is, in terms of a necessary ground-either the relations or the identities.
Sayfa 20 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
There can be nothing contingent in the latter if there is identity between the rational and the real.
Sayfa 20 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
To ground the contingent being on its conditions of existence is thus to refer it to a foundation or origin which maintain an infinite distance from it. The infinite nature of that distance is the condition of contingency as such. In response to this, the alternative exists of referring finite beings back to conditions of existence which are necessary, but which are conceived not in terms of an infinite distance from them, but racher as the ground for a self-generating and self-regulating totality, From Spinoza to Marx, this is the line of modern thought In this case, however, contingency is eliminated and radically absorbed by the necessary. It is in this sense that Hegel proclaims the identity between the rational and the real.
Sayfa 20 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
To assert that something is radically contingent, and that its essence does not imply its existence, therefore amounts to saying that the conditions of existence of an entity are exterior to it. Only in the case of a strictly necessary being does a perfect coincidence between essence and existence occur.
Sayfa 19 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
Our thesis is that antagonism has a revelatory function, in that it shows the ultimately contingent nature of all objectivity.
Sayfa 18 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
With antagonism, however, it is an entirely different matter: it is not my identity which is expressed, but the impossibility of its constitution.
Sayfa 18 - Verso, 1990.(Preface)Kitabı okuyor
The Hegelian conception of contradiction subsumed within it both social antagonisms and the processes of natural change. This was possible insofar as contradiction was an internal moment of the concept, the rationality of the real was the rationality of the system, with any 'outside' excluded by definition. In our conception of antagonism, on the other hand, we are faced with a 'constitutive outside'. It is an ‘outside' which blocks the identity of the 'inside' (and is, nonetheless, the prerequisite for its constitution at the same time). With antagonism, denial does not originate from the 'inside' of identity itself but, in its most radical sense, from outside; it is thus pure facticity which cannot be referred back to any underlying rationality.
Sayfa 17 - Verso, 1990.(Preface)Kitabı okuyor
(…) to affirm its [class struggle] preeminence would have questioning the ultimate coherence and rationality of history.
Sayfa 17 - Verso, 1990.(Preface)Kitabı okuyor
A concept such as the ‘cunning of reason' in Hegel can only assert the rationality of the real at the expense of reducing antagonism, negativity, to an appearance through which a higher form of rationality and positivity works
Sayfa 16 - Verso, 1990.(Preface)Kitabı okuyor